Western Tradition

To Be Unfit for the Modern World

The Great Tradition patiently endures, ready to speak on its own behalf, ready to challenge narrow prejudices, ready to examine those with the courage to be interrogated by it, ready to teach those who are willing to be made unfit for the modern world... The...

Tradition: The Concept and Its Claim Upon Us

True unity among men must have its roots in that common participation in the holy tradition reaching back to an utterance of God Himself... One wonders whether tradition is not actually anti-historical. It stands in stark contrast...

God, Jonah Goldberg, and the Suicide of the West

Jonah Goldberg terms a "miracle" the great wealth that has been produced by the West since the middle of the eighteenth century. But will the miracle that is the West give way to the suicide of the West? Ah, that is the question he attempts to answer in his...

Is the West Worth Defending?

We should respond to the question of whether the West is worth defending by first asking the more important question of which West it is that we are being asked to defend... There are many people who...

Jeremiah and the Reclamation of the West

Liberalism comes to us with a devilish smile, quietly seeking the abolition of our traditions, communities, history, identity, and ways of life. Rather than follow the path of "progress" into oblivion, we should heed Jeremiah's call to seek repentance and a return to our roots and traditions,...

Charles Lindbergh’s Philosophy of Vital Instinct

The heightened pace of life in industrial societies, Charles Lindbergh realized, necessitated reflection on what type of life is best suited for man. Which of the two, reason or vital instinct, constitutes the best function of human beings? Which of the two contributes best to man's happiness...

A Thinker You Should Know: Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin’s philosophical framework attempted to break down the ideological barriers to the search for order and the recovery of transcendent consciousness... Eric Voegelin's work is not well known outside a relatively small group of academics and their...

Christian, Therefore, Conservative

The great tradition of Western culture has proven peculiarly absorptive; it has brought influences from many disparate sources into a rich conversation. But it is Christianity that has for centuries formed its core. And it is, above all, this core to which “conservatism at its highest” remains...

“Crime and Punishment”: A Timeless Psychological Masterpiece

“There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken,” writes Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. And such is the impression made upon us by Dosteovsky’s incredible psychological masterpiece... “Personally, I require a ceiling, although a high one....

Courage to Defeat Postmodernism

There is a way out of postmodernism: courage. You do not reason yourself out of the postmodern, you fight your way out. You realize that logic can only take you so far. Then you have a decision to make. And you make it. Western civilization is founded...

What the West Has Given the World

While the West has made more than its share of mistakes, it has also done some things better than any other civilization, or, at the very least, introduced things to the world that the world then claimed for all of humanity...

Why Do Progressives Hate the West So Much?

President Trump was right to defend the West, a civilization which goes back to the Homeric epic and the Hebrew prophets, and having been baptized by Christ, is “not the property of any particular race but the universal aspiration of humankind”...

Literature & the Foundations of the West

The questions for the West have now become: What it is that we should remember and teach? What are the elements of Western civilization that might sustain what is left and reconstruct what has been damaged or destroyed?... Today's offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the...

Pessimism & the Wisdom of Tradition

Conservatives must turn to the Western Tradition in order to abandon their cynicism and regain a proper sense of pessimism, which they can then use to challenge the optimism of the liberal worldview... Why have modern American...